Senior Software Engineer, Storage Infrastructure

Planet designs, builds, and operates a large constellation of imaging satellites and delivers cloud-based geospatial data to commercial, environmental, and humanitarian users. The Senior Software Engineer will evolve the core storage platform, working across object storage, metadata indexing, event notification, and disaster recovery while owning technical direction and supporting large-scale backend systems.

Responsibilities:

• Build and maintain systems that provide efficient access to new and growing data sets
• Extend and improve services for internal data search and image processing
• Operate and tune Elasticsearch indexing for core data sets
• Full service ownership by measuring performance, creating alerts, being on call, and responding to incidents and performance anomalies
• Shape technical approach and system design for the team's high-impact projects
• Help engineers on the team grow through code reviews, pairing, and design discussions
• Contribute to the technical roadmap and help shape the architectural direction of the team's systems
• Participate in design reviews and help drive alignment on technical decisions

Requirements:

• 10+ years of software engineering experience of which:
• 6+ years of Go development experience building production backend services
• 6+ years of Python development experience building customer-facing APIs
• Fluency with AI-assisted development tools (e.g. Claude, Copilot) as part of your daily engineering workflow
• Experience monitoring and operating highly scalable cloud-native software
• Experience with relational datastores (PostgreSQL or MySQL) and non-relational datastores (e.g. BigTable, Elasticsearch) and an understanding of when to use each
• Experience building, releasing, and supporting highly available, consistently performant services
• Excellent communication skills and an ability to work well in a remote setting
• Experience improving codebases, documentation, and team practices through regular contributions beyond feature work
• Experience driving architectural decisions and guiding technical trade-offs across a team
• Experience supporting the growth of engineers around you through collaboration and knowledge sharing
• Ability to lead system design conversations for distributed backend services
• This is a full-time, remote position based in the United States. If located near an office, you are expected to work from that office 3 days per week
• Experience maintaining infrastructure with Kubernetes and Terraform
• Experience building services that leverage cloud-based infrastructure and tooling such as AWS or GCP
• Experience working with geospatial data before, even tangentially